B.S., University of Wisconsin – La Crosse; M.A., University of Northern Colorado; Ph.D., Florida State University.

After completing her bachelor’s degree in secondary education/Spanish at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, Dr. Serrano served as an elementary education teacher for children of seasonal migrant citrus workers in Florida. After five years of teaching, she returned to study at the University of Northern Colorado, where she majored in curriculum and instruction with a major concentration in elementary bilingual and bicultural education. Dr. Serrano earned a doctorate in multilingual-multicultural education at Florida State University, where she was the recipient of a bilingual education fellowship awarded by the U.S. Department of Education. She studied for a year at the University of Valencia as an undergraduate, and completed a summer intensive study at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Spain on a scholarship from the Florida Department of Education. Throughout her career, Dr. Serrano has engaged in teaching and learning as an ongoing process to remain current in research-based best practices for improving academic achievement of English language learners. Her teaching includes eleven years of K-12 classroom experience and immigrant adult education, and fifteen years at all levels of higher education in teacher education. Before coming to PBA, Dr. Serrano served as a full professor at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida. She remains active in her field by planning and implementing K-12 teacher training institutes while consulting for the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, DC.